Bush's Iraq surge succeeded — and for that some on the left will never forgive him.
As of now, we can not say that Obama's Afghanistan surge succeeded.

And it is hard to see how it can, given Obama's two decisions, one dubious — not to
give General McChrystal the number of reinforcements he had asked for — and one
downright crazy — setting a withdrawal date at same time as the surge.

McChrystal is a military expert; Obama is not. If McChrystal said he need X number of
troops, then Obama should have either given him those reinforcements, or found another
general.

I called setting a withdrawal date crazy, because it is. Even a complete military
amateur should be able to understand that setting that date would encourage our
enemies, by telling them they only had to last until then.

Did Obama not know that? Or, even worse, did he not care? Was he simply
carrying out a campaign promise without worrying about the effects of that withdrawal date on
Afghanistan, and the United States?

(More here,
though I should warn you that the author is quite biased.)

In a recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Joseph Haubrich of
the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and I examined U.S. business cycles from 1880 to
the present. Our study not only confirms Friedman's plucking model but also shows
that deep recessions associated with financial crises recover at a faster pace than
deep recessions without them.
. . .
Thus the slow recovery that we are experiencing from the recession that ended in July 2009
is an exception to the historical pattern. This can largely be attributed to the
unprecedented housing bust, a proximate measure of which is the collapse of residential
investment, which still is far below its historic pattern during recoveries. Another problem
may be uncertainty over changes in fiscal and regulatory policy, or over structural change in
the economy.

Not being an economist, I won't study his paper, but the overall rationale for his argument —
that economies tend to return to their long-term trend lines — seems plausible enough
to me.

Sarah Palin Was Right about the
death panels,
as Steven Rattner admitted a few weeks ago, in an op-ed in the New York
Times.

He didn't give her credit, though he should have.

Her point wasn't difficult to understand, then or now. If we are going to control health
care costs through bureaucratic rationing, the bureaucrats will, inevitably, focus on the high
end-of-life medical costs, and equally inevitably they will decide that, because of poor prospects,
some elderly patients won't get care that might extend their lives.

"Death panels" may be an overly dramatic name for those bureaucratic committees, but her
point is valid.

(Rattner has had an unusual career, going from a low-level journalist to a high-level
fund manager,
with a scandal or two along the way, and much help from friends in high places.)

Metro Transit Eliminated The Free Ride Area In Seattle: So
the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE) will be closing their
homeless shelters.

Representatives of some 500 homeless people who stay in two tent cities and 16 shelters in
the Seattle area — mostly churches — closed most of those facilities Friday until their demands
for more free Metro bus tickets are met.
. . .
In a news release, the group said the closing of the downtown free bus-ride bus zone was
"a punishing blow to poor and homeless people." The group said that beginning Monday,
it will get $50,000 worth of bus tickets from Metro, about a fifth of what it says it needs for
the rest of the year.

From time to time, I think that Seattle, and homeless advocates generally, can no longer surprise
me — and then they prove me wrong.

(From what I've seen, nearly all of the homeless in Seattle have both the time and the physical
ability to walk anywhere in the downtown area. And, although it rains a lot here —
in the winter — we seldom have dangerously low or high temperatures.)

According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural
white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than
U.S. president Barack Obama.

Karl Rove's Electoral College Trends: He sees Romney as
behind, but not hopelessly so.

If you study those trends, you will see that you could fit a straight line to Romney's
safe electoral college votes, showing him gaining steadily since April. Obama's trend
is a mirror image, for the first months, followed by a recent bump — which may
be dissipating.

In general, I have found Rove's analyses to be biased, but not by very much. And I don't
see any partisan bias in this chart, where he is mostly summarizing poll results, from a variety of
sources. (If there is any bias, it would come from those polls, not Rove.)

You can see a slightly larger version of the trends
here (by clicking on the chart),
along with his map, and an explanation of his methodology.

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as
money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of
particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

The support isn't surprising, but it is a little surprising to see it given so openly. I have
wondered for years whether OPEC members might be subsidizing Green causes, but
I always thought they would do it in ways that preserved "plausible deniability".

Mendacity Or Incompetence? (2) Back to the question
of whether the Obama administration was lying about the attack on our consulate in Libya, which
I discussed, most recently,
here.

As you probably recall, I argued that Obama may not have been willing to accept the
evidence that it was a terrorist attack, even as others in his administration have.
(Hillary Clinton is now admitting the obvious.)

Now here's what I noticed about that series: As late as two days ago, Obama was still
resisting calling it a terrorist attack. Here's an exchange from his appearance on
The View.

QUESTION: “I heard Hillary Clinton say it was an act of terrorism. Is it?
What do you say?”

OBAMA: “We are still doing an investigation. There is no doubt that the kind of weapons
that were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action. Now, we don’t
have all the information yet so we are still gathering.”

(I should add that on the day after the attack, Obama did say "acts of terror", but that's not quite
the same, as any diplomat can tell you, as a "terrorist attack".)

Note that he is still reluctant to accept reality in that exchange, as if he is hoping that more
information will allow him to keep most of his original position.

(Victor Davis Hanson comes to a
similar conclusion
about Obama; our president finds it hard to accept the reality that his Middle East policies have
failed.)

"Worst Economy In 50 Years" If you are old enough,
you probably remember that was what Bill Clinton was saying back in 1992 — and that
enough people believed him so that he won.

How bad was the economy in 1992? This bad: In every quarter of 1992, the
GDP grew at more than a
4 percent rate.
(In the first three quarters after Clinton became president, the growth slowed down.)

As you probably heard, today the Bureau of Economic Analysis lowered its estimate of GDP
for the second quarter from 1.7 to
1.3 percent.
If the news program you were listening to was any good, they reminded you that the
growth rate in the first quarter was only 2.0 percent.

But surely there have been some better quarters since President Obama was elected?
Yes, two. In the fourth quarter of 2009, growth hit 4.0 percent, and in the fourth quarter of
2011, it hit 4.1 percent. (Here's a
graph
showing all the quarters since Obama's inauguration.)

The growth rates in every quarter of 1992 — 4.5, 4.3, 4.2, and 4.3 percent —
were higher than Obama's best two quarters.

What do you think Bill Clinton would say now, if he were writing speeches for Mitt
Romney?

(Those with especially good memories will recall that the GDP estimates announced during the 1992
campaign were much lower. But the revisions were announced too late to help
President Bush.

That first BEA link goes to an interactive page, so you'll have to take a couple of steps to see
the actual numbers.)

President Obama made the case to the ladies of The View that we should "marginalize" the
infamous anti-Islam video that supposedly sparked attacks on American embassies across the
world by "ignoring it."

Good idea, but it would help if Obama himself would set a better example. He could, for
instance, have left it out of his latest UN speech.

Some of the replacement referees working for the NFL -- the nation's most lucrative sport --
aren't even good enough for the Lingerie Football League, it was revealed on
Tuesday.

The LFL, which fields women playing in bras and skimpy underwear, announced that it had
fired several of the referees now calling prime time NFL games for 'on-field incompetent
officiating.'

As well as titillating, I found that (and other revelations about the subs) mildly surprising.
There must be thousands of football referees with years of college experience, and, given our
lousy job market, I would think that hundreds of them would at least be interested in even
temporary NFL work.

(Some of you are going to want to know more about the
LFL. You may be surprised, for instance,
to learn that they claim to be a women's professional league that is "actually growing".

The team names are: Mist, Valkyrie, Chill, Temptation, Sin, Bliss, Crush, Passion, Charm,
Breeze, Heart, and Saints. Which, I think you will agree, give one a different impression
(with the exception of the Saints) than the names of NFL teams.)

Aluminum is one of the easiest metals to recycle. In 60 days, a can of beer can be sold,
trashed, collected, melted, turned into sheet, cast into a new can, and filled again with
fermented barley. Cans make up 2% of the volume of recycled trash, but 40% of the
value, according to the industry.

As you probably know, recycling the aluminum saves a lot of energy, about 90 percent according
to the article.

The article is a bit vague on the individual collectors who earn a little extra money by picking
up aluminum cans that other people have thrown away, but it looks to me as if they seldom
earn even the minimum wage.

On the other hand, the barriers to entry into the business (as economists might say) are very
low.

More than a week after President Barack Obama's cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members
of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle
for covering the gruesome crime.

"I know there's a story in there somewhere," said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to
Obama's home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8.
"Right now though, it's probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come
in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered
two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation."

Added Meacham, "It's not so cut and dried."

You may find it entertaining to try to add reactions from some of your favorite journalists to that
piece, as
Patterico did.

Barack Obama Is Worse Than George W. Bush: All right,
a lot of people believe that (me, for instance), but most for different reasons than
Ralph Nader.

On issues related to the military and foreign policy, Obama’s worse than Bush, “in the sense
that he’s more aggressive, more illegal worldwide,” Nader told POLITICO, going so far as to
call Obama a “war criminal.”

And why not? Nader at least is being consistent, unlike most on the left.

Perhaps Jay Inslee Is Trying For The Wrong Job: The
Washington state Democratic candidate for governor has been telling us that he can pick
economic winners.
(And even that he has picked economic winners in the past, a claim that seems, at
best, dubious, especially to those who have taken even a casual look as his personal
finances.)

Suppose that he is right. Suppose that he is one of those rare people who can
tell us, in advance, which businesses will prosper over the next ten or twenty years.

If Inslee really does have that rare talent, he should be looking for a job, not in Olympia,
but on Wall Street, where he can direct investments to winning companies, thereby creating
jobs and even making a little money for himself. (Okay, a lot of money, if he
really is that good.)

In contrast, a Washington state governor, even with the support of party majorities in the
legislature, can do much less to direct investments in the right directions. They can,
it is true, give tax breaks to favored industries, but those tax breaks will have to be paid for
by tax increases somewhere else, perhaps on other businesses that would be able to prosper,
if it were not for those higher taxes.

Those limits on investments are especially tight, right now, given our budget problems.

The experiences of other states (and nations) that have tried to direct investment in this
way, tried to institute industrial policies, are not encouraging. I am not saying there are
no successes, but they are so rare that many nations, and many states, have given up on
them.

If Inslee were to give up his campaign for
governor and, instead, begin setting up the Jay Inslee hedge fund, I would wish him good
luck. But I wouldn't put my money in that fund.

Three Pinocchios To Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn
Kessler: In an earlier post,
I mentioned the interesting fact that President Obama has missed more than half of his daily
intelligence briefings. Crossroads, Karl Rove's outfit, has been using that fact in an ad,
an ad that Kessler thinks deserves
three "Pinocchios".
(Out of a maximum of four.)

But his reasoning is bogus. He argues that Obama gets his intelligence in other ways,
that other recent presidents were worse, that the released presidential schedules are sometimes
misleading, and so on. All that may be true, but none of it touches on the truth of the
claim in the ad.

Parents will recognize Kessler's excuses. If a parent asks a child whether he missed
classes, they will not be terribly surprised if they hear claims that other kids missed more classes,
that he read the assignment, or even that the school records are sometimes wrong.
The wise parent will understand these excuses for what they are, attempts to evade the unpleasant
truth.

Kessler probably believes what he wrote, so I am giving him three Pinocchios, rather than
four.

(You can watch the ad at the Kessler link.

Should presidents have daily intelligence briefings? In my opinion, yes, as long as the
war on terror goes on, though I would listen to contrary arguments from anyone who knows what
actually goes on in them.)

Thaddeus McCotter's Aides Fail Him: This is, undoubtedly,
one of the strangest
vote fraud stories
I have ever encountered.

A smart, and more than a little bit odd,
Republican congressman
rises in the House, and even runs for president, though few noticed. When that ends, he
goes back to running for his House seat, and encounters a problem. Four of his aides had
forged the signatures on his nominating petitions, and not for the first time.

One of four former staffers to U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter charged in the petition fraud
scandal that drove him into early retirement pleaded no contest to five misdemeanors
Tuesday.
. . .
Three other members of McCotter's staff were charged in the scandal, which involved the
submission of duplicate, photocopied petitions in an effort to qualify McCotter for the 2012
ballot. After the phony petitions were uncovered, McCotter withdrew from the race and
later resigned.

The Free Press reported on Aug. 16 that duplicate and doctored petitions also were used to
help McCotter qualify for the ballot in 2008 and 2010.

What makes this especially strange is that Michigan requires so few signatures — just
1,000 — that it would be easy to collect enough legitimate signatures in a few days of
work.

According to Woodruff, McCotter hired staffers who "were just as quirky as he was".
Right now, that looks like a serious mistake.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has a stern warning for the U.S. political class:
Get real about the gap between federal revenues and spending, or get ready for disaster.

Mr. Martin knows of what he speaks. In 1993, when he was Canada's finance minister,
his country faced a daunting fiscal crisis. It wasn't Greece, but by 1994 Canada's federal
debt-to-GDP ratio was getting close to 80%, and the cost of servicing the debt had begun to
eat up an incredible one-third of government revenue.

Martin says that "arithmetic" forced Canada to make the changes necessary to reduce that
gap. The changes were painful at the time, but pretty clearly beneficial in the long
run.

It may have been his business career
that gave Martin the experience to see that "arithmetic". One of the many things that worries
me about Obama's administration is how few in it have ever managed a
company, how few have had to face the constraints of "arithmetic".

Here's something remarkable about those Canadian cuts: To the best of my knowledge,
they had little or no effect on the usual measures of outcomes, life expectancy, infant mortality,
international test scores, and so on. I will admit that I have not made a systematic
search for the damage that those cuts might have caused (though I plan to do so some time),
but I am nearly certain that the New York Times would have told me about the
damage, if it had been significant.

(That business career also caused him problems since his holdings made him a walking, talking
conflict of interest.

There are other democratic countries, Denmark, for instance, that have also faced the
"arithmetic" successfully, and I hope to find some good accounts of how these other nations
did that, too.)

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate Candidate, Law Professor, And
Scofflaw? Professor Jacobson says that Warren ignored a few of those
little details
that lawyers are supposed to pay attention to.

Warren represented not just Travelers, but numerous other companies starting in the late 1990s
working out of and using her Harvard Law School office in Cambridge, which she listed as her
office of record on briefs filed with various courts. Warren, however, never has been
licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.

As detailed below, there are at least two provisions of Massachusetts law Warren may have
violated. First, on a regular and continuing basis she used her Cambridge office for the
practice of law without being licensed in Massachusetts. Second, in addition to operating
an office for the practice of law without being licensed in Massachusetts, Warren actually
practiced law in Massachusetts without being licensed.

Not being a lawyer, I won't try to decide whether she did break the law or speculate on how
serious these possible violations might be.

But it is interesting to learn that she had a (very profitable) law practice while on the faculty at
Harvard, and that she used her Harvard office for that practice.